‘Let children play’: the educational message from across Europe

While approaches may differ, the importance of free time to play is increasingly being recognised

• Call for more play time amid schoolification' of UK childhood

Every morning, Arja Salonen drops her five-year-old son, Onni, off at a daycare centre in Espoo, west of Helsinki, where he will spend the next eight hours doing what Finnish educators believe all children his age should do: playing.

School, and formal learning, does not start in Finland until age seven. Before then, children's preoccupations are not reading, writing or arithmetic, but, said Salonen, herself a secondary-school teacher in the capital, learning more important things".